underground dance music point us towards understanding dance’s figurative role in
relation to altered states of consciousness (Thornton 1996:60), building
communitas (Fikentscher 2000:60), and going ‘mad’ or ‘losing it’ (Pini 2001). Like
Turner’s ‘fertile nothingness’ of liminality, where participants find themselves
‘striving after new forms and structures’ (V. Turner 1990:12), such accounts
indicate that participants construct their own free, gestative cultural space, one that
can be likened to spontaneous communitas. Removed from the dictates of discreet,
polite Torontonian culture and given an opportunity to engage in ecstatic dance,
participants discover those moments ‘when compatible people...obtain a flash of
lucid mutual understanding on the existential level, when they feel that all problems,
not just their problems, could be resolved; whether emotional or cognitive, if only
the group which is felt (in the first person) as “essentially us” could sustain its inter-
subjective illumination’ (V.Turner 1979a: 45). Yet throughout the course of the
event it was observed that many occupants of the VIP room (as well as some of
those drifting around the edges of the club) never once strayed on to the dance floor.
Are such individuals peripheral to the ritual proceedings and, if so, who are they and
what, if any, is their role?
On this particular night, as is the case for most other events at the club, the
occupants of Turbo’s VIP room were mostly DJs, club and rave promoters, niche
media pundits and other industry insiders and their guests—in short, a
demographic typical of most VIP rooms in contemporary club culture. While
Thornton’s analysis indicates that such figures are in possession of the most
subcultural capital—markers of greater insider status which, she argues, betray the
so-called egalitarian ethos of underground dance music events—I prefer to
characterize their presence and role as indications of ‘normative’ communitas.
Occupying a position removed from the dance floor, these ‘insider’ patrons (and a
number of ‘regular’ clubbers allowed into the VIP room on this occasion) have a
unique vantage point from which to observe and assess key aspects of the ritual
proceedings: the conduct of the DJ; how occupants of the dance floor are attending
to the music played, the DJ and each other; and the reactions of their industry
colleagues. Put simply they are able to monitor events in such a way as to make
alternative judgements on the etiquette and efficacy of the performance.
While it is common for promoters, DJs, media and club owners to locate their
participatory origins as former neophytes by regularly intoning such claims as ‘I’ll
always be a raver’ or ‘I’ll always be a club kid’, there is little doubt from the dance
floor or from other VIPs that they stand out from the spontaneous and are
staunchly rooted in the realm of the normative. As professionals, performers,
entrepreneurs, etc., they are rarely caught in the throes of ecstatic dance. Instead,
they are recognized for organizing, maintaining and promoting the ‘utopian
blueprint’ (V.Turner 1977:46) of the dance floor through activities which serve to
contextualize events within a wider social and historical framework. Here, gossiping
and networking serve to reinforce the social bonds of the community as one which
exists both inside and outside dance (the activity) and clubs (the location); critically
evaluating the event at hand affords promoters and DJs the opportunity to plan for
172 MORGAN GERARD